And All Of This
by ChronicCombustion
Summary: "Nobody has ever loved me as much as I have loved him…" AkuDem. AU. Themes of depression and self-hate. Non-graphic suicide attempt. Mentions of anorexia. Angst with happy ending. For ninemelodies.


Written for **ninemelodies** and based off her Demyx and my Axel's first few meetings in our RP Verse on tumblr. I wrote this with a platonic, brotherly kind of relationship in mind but you can easily view it as romantic if you so desire~

Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts, nor any of the characters/locations therein. I also do not own the song lyrics used in this fic.

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 _Lie to me,_  
 _Convince me that I've been sick forever_  
 _And all of this_  
 _Will make sense when I get better..._

It was kinda funny if he thought about it – when he actually _stopped_ to think about it. How many times had he smiled in the last few months? A dozen? Two dozen? More than that, surely. He couldn't remember ever smiling that much before.

Not since he was a child, anyway, not since Mom kicked Daddy out of the house.

That's where everything had really started, actually. Mom didn't like his over-imagination. So many doctors' appointments, so many different prescriptions to "even him out" and Daddy had protested. Daddy had said there wasn't anything wrong with _"our son."_ He wasn't "sick," he wasn't "hallucinating," there was nothing to "fix" or "cure" or "make better." He was a kid, goddamnit, _let him be and stop treating him like a stain on a new dress!_

Mom hadn't liked that. Mom had filed for divorce. The last time he saw Daddy was when Daddy lost the battle for custody and was declared an unfit parent by Mom's new lawyer boyfriend.

He was too little to know what a restraining order was, but he found out later and finally understood why Daddy wasn't allowed to come and visit like other kids' parents that got divorced. His sister was still so small. She barely remembered Daddy now.

But he did.

Life after that had been made of total suck. Mom moved her new lawyer boyfriend into the house that should have been a home but wasn't. Mom kept taking him to see the doctors, kept telling him that he'd get better soon if he took his medicine. Ten years and multiple anxiety issues later and nothing was fixed. Nothing was "all better." Mom liked his sister – his sister didn't need pills. But he did. He did, and Mom didn't like him because he wasn't "normal." Broken things were ugly, and there was no room for ugliness in such a perfect, pristine household.

So he'd stopped fighting. You couldn't lose if you didn't fight, right? And so he let Mom tuck a brand new bottle of mind-erasers into his pocket and took them obediently with every meal. He lost his appetite somewhere along the way, simply forgetting to eat. He was broken, a malfunctioning machine that didn't need to try and act human anymore. What good was eating if it just meant he'd lose his ability to taste anything other than the little blue and white capsules that acted as dessert nearly every time he opened his mouth?

An "act of defiance," Mom's lawyer boyfriend called it. "Attention seeking," Mom decided. "Anorexia," the doctors proclaimed.

Sick.

Always so sick.

He had disliked hospitals before, but he learned to _despise_ them after five months in therapy to try and cure him of his latest "disease."

He moved out as soon as he was done with school.

His jittery paranoia was like a force field, driving people away from him so he couldn't lose himself anymore than he already had. What need had the broken for friends? He couldn't function on his own, wasn't worth wasting breath on. Mom had taught him that. No use meant no allies. Allies were for normal people and he would never be normal. Mom had taught him that, too.

He got himself a job where he didn't have to interact much with people, and when he did it was only to hand them their change. Day in and day out that was all it was, an endless string of no-eye-contact and brief, forced hellos. No one ever stayed to talk and he never bothered to try and make the first move.

Until Demyx.

Demyx was a surfer boy, seven years younger than he was, lanky and blond with eyes the color of the ocean. Demyx was a golden-tan whirlwind of energy with no discernable off switch, could talk a mile a minute and never run out of things to say or laughs to share. Demyx grinned a face-splitting grin at him, spoke to him like they'd been best friends since childhood. Demyx liked him. Demyx stayed.

It was Demyx who found him hollow and hysterical out near the river at two in the morning, and it was Demyx who dragged him back to safety and begged him not to go. Demyx's hands pushed the water from his lungs as those ocean-colored eyes welled with fear for the half-drowned friend met barely a week before. And when his heart began to beat for itself and the river left his chest in heaving, gasping coughs, it was Demyx that got him to the failure-scented hospital and sat beside him all night long to make sure he didn't die in his sleep.

He asked the sandy-haired surfer boy later why, and Demyx had given him a weaker, sadder smile and told him simply, _"Dude… You're my friend."_

He'd sat there, shocked beyond words, and stared. Friend. So foreign a word upon his own tongue that he forgot to keep the damn thing locked tight. He cried, sobbed into Demyx's shoulder as the surfer boy gave him the first hug he'd received in almost a decade, and spilled everything that had ever been wrong with himself all over Demyx's ears.

Demyx listened until he'd cried himself into silence and only after the torrent of bitter self-dislike had ebbed did the surfer boy quietly ask him why he'd tried to die.

Demyx scolded him gently, told him there was nothing _wrong_ with him; that nothing needed to be fixed because nothing about him was _broken._ Sure, there were tics, sure, there were bugs and twitches, and sure, he sometimes had to pop a pill to keep the world from throwing him back into the Twilight Zone, but _no one_ was perfect. _No one_ was without flaws.

It didn't make him any less of a human being, Demyx said. It didn't make him worthless, didn't make him "crazy" or "sick" or any of the other hundred things he'd never believed to be anything but true about himself. He protested. Demyx held firm. Any word he said against his own merit was a word that Demyx vehemently refused.

The night passed into the realm of sunlight and flowed onwards until a week had passed, two weeks, a month, and Demyx had somehow ended up halfway moving into his tiny-ass apartment and claiming the couch as a bed. Company became his remedy, his newest prescription, and somehow a life of loneliness and forced dysfunction seemed farther and farther away. He hadn't realized he'd forgotten how it felt to smile.

Six months came and went like firefly lights. Slowly the number of pills sliding into his gut each day lessened as anxiety slowed to a crawl. The usual fear and self hate started to fade to embers – still burning but nowhere as bright. Hunger actually made an appearance in his daily routine, much to Demyx's delight and his own surprise. He'd forgotten that food had a taste other than ashes. Like a piece of glass that had once been cracked but then pulled from the bent framing and carefully repaired, he could feel himself breathing properly for the first time ever.

And Demyx, gangly, cheerful, surfer boy Demyx, the first person to see something other than sickness when they looked at him, his friend, his life-preserver, the _brother_ he didn't know he'd needed so badly, never went a day without reminding him that being alive was one thing. To actually _live_ was entirely another.

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Lyrics at the top are from Breathe No More, by Evanescence.

Summary is based off the prompt '#27: Loveless' from The 3AM Epiphany by Brian Kiteley.

(Not part of my 3AM Challenge stories.)


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